The Happiness Glass Read online

  Every morning, I walk past an aged care home, where framed photographs crowd the windowsills of single, functional, uniformly cheerless rooms. Some residents have brought a special chair from home, but there is little space to accommodate their personal furniture. For all I know the elderly inhabitants regard this place as a palace of comfort when compared to the terrors of managing age-related infirmities at home. But if homesickness comes when we no longer inhabit the same spaces as our memories, then this sprawling building is a palace of loss on the grand scale, a veritable Taj Mahal. As I pass along its southern flank, where no sunlight touches the bedroom windows, and the iron railings, though not above head-height, have been climb-proofed with sheets of perspex, I am grateful to be able to walk freely towards a café, and my morning coffee. The nursing home is a place of safety, no doubt, but it is also a kind of prison, and it reeks not only of overcooked food but of nostalgia in the modern sense of longing for something lost that can never be recovered.

  It was while pondering the meaning of nostalgia and homesickness that I was, by chance, introduced to the work of the Indigenous musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. Born blind in Galiwin’ku, on Elcho Island, which lies off the coast of Arnhem Land, around five-hundred kilometres east of Darwin, the acutely shy Dr G. Yunupingu (as he has been referred to since his death, in deference to the Indigenous custom of not using the deceased person’s given names) was self-taught on a number of instruments. These included the guitar, which as a left-hander he played upside down but conventionally strung, thus forcing him to invent new chord patterns. His true instrument, however, was his extraordinary voice.

  His remote community had already produced the influential band Yothu Yindi. Dr G. Yunupingu was a member of Yothu Yindi for a time, touring with them across Australia as well as overseas. Then in 2008 his first solo album Gurrumul was released to wide acclaim; over time, it went double platinum. It shocks me that I had never heard him sing until six months after his death, but back in 2008 I was studying, and pretty much everything passed over my head that was not related to my thesis, including, to my regret, this man’s unique voice.

  With limited English, he sang mostly in his own Yolngu language. But the language is lyrical, and his deep love of it is evident, while the beauty of his voice transcends the need to understand the words: Dr Yunupingu had, as many before me have said, the other-worldly voice one expects to hear from an angel. Perhaps the most perceptive comment about his singing was made by American music critic, Jon Pareles, in a review in the New York Times; Pareles wrote that Dr Yunupingu’s voice “seems to arrive from a distance”, and this is precisely what it does sound like – it is a voice that reaches the listener’s ear from far, far away, perhaps even from a longed-for but irrecoverable past, for the voice of Gurrumul is nostalgia condensed. It did not surprise me then, when I searched for an English translation of his lyrics, to find that they almost all express the singer’s deep yearning for home, and for his family.

  “Grief have taken hold of me for my father, when the sun sets” is the opening lyric of his haunting song ‘Bapa’, about the death of his father. He talks about how, when the sun goes down, his mind goes there, to the familiar place. The song ‘Baywara’ begins in English, “I heard my mother from the long distance, making me cry”.

  To listen to Yunupingu sing touches the same nerve in me that Edward Hopper presses in paintings like Morning Sun and Automat, although Yunupingu’s touch is gentler, more innocent: it is the touch of a child reaching for its mother’s hand rather than the touch of a lover. His sublime voice taps into the same aching melancholy that Hammershøi captured in his silent interiors. Perhaps it is this common longing that all artists, in all disciplines, strive to identify and to match, yet it is accomplished only by the truly gifted.

  Dr G. Yunupingu was admired by music celebrities, from Elton John, to Sting, to Quincy Jones, but there was something disturbing in the sight of this quiet, dignified, blind man appearing on English breakfast television. Gurrumul seemed vulnerable on the brightly lit set, and a little like an exotic specimen that had been brought from a strange far land to entertain. It made me long to put an arm around him, and lead him home. More surprising than his acceptance by music royalty, perhaps, was the positive response of white Australians in such numbers to songs sung in an Indigenous language. Perhaps longing is its own language. Or perhaps they recognised in Gurrumul’s voice the sound of a traditional man whose ancestry reaches back further than that of the kings and queens of England, and whose life was synonymous with his place, with Elcho Island, in a perfect symbiosis of man and land that those of us who are not Indigenous to Australia can only observe with envy.

  In a sad footnote, at the time of his death in July 2017 he was said to be ‘long grassing’, or living rough, outside Darwin.

  After almost two decades of living away from Australia, there were times when I feared that my homesickness would manifest as some unspeakable disease. I would wait too long to leave and find myself marooned; I would die in the place that was not my home. It was the light I missed as much as anything. In a television interview, the artist, Sidney Nolan, who had long been living in England, spoke about the special qualities of the Australian light; he wanted to spend his last moments on earth there in that light, he said. I cried when I heard that he had died in England during one of the darkest Octobers I could ever remember.

  This preference for home over away is not fashionable. In affluent First World countries we are expected to aspire to travel, especially to exotic destinations – indeed, the conversations I overhear at the hairdressers hardly touch on anything else. To be what was once called a ‘homebody’ smacks of timidity, a lack of boldness that does not do credit, while admitting to homesickness on a ten-day jaunt to the seaside is scarcely believable and, frankly, a bit bonkers, but I am unapologetic.

  What keeps me from travel is not fear – the world has always been dangerous – but the deep comfort of the familiar. There are a few places I would leave home for, though it would be to revisit somewhere already loved and known rather than an expedition into unchartered territory. The heightened desire for home has, I think, to do with time – the way it appeared to be limitless when I was young and severely limited now that I am older. With that realisation, everything has shifted. I keep no ‘bucket list’, indeed, I despise the very idea. But what I do keep is a determination to draw every last drop of pleasure from the people and places I hold dear.

  Changes of Address

  She began to miss Tom the instant she lost sight of him waving from the observation deck. From Heathrow to Hong Kong the image of his raised arm waving a folded newspaper replayed in her head as she listed the arguments that had propelled her onto the plane. After two decades of yearning, she had given in to the long weariness of homesickness. These were the sacred words: jacaranda, oleander, eucalyptus. Lily recited them miserably, but was not comforted.

  Flying over Australia in the early hours of the morning, the beauty of the land was gradually revealed by the rising sun. Lily rested her eyes upon luminous ridges of red sand; shadows of trees stretched slender fingers, softening contours that would be harsh by midday. Home. She followed the swirling lines and loops of dried-up riverbeds, finding not a straight line anywhere until the man-made scratches of a road appeared. The dots of trees gave the flat surface, with its snaking lines, the look of an Aboriginal painting, as if they had always known this terrain from thirty-five thousand feet. To fly for hours over the solid emptiness of Australia, she thought, was a source of comfort that was probably inexplicable to Europeans.

  Gina slept beside her, her dark head drooping. She had shredded the past, Lily thought, and shuddered at the pain of the final days, of Tom’s face as she crumpled paper to pack china into crates. Shaking, leaking doubt from every pore, she had climbed onto the plane, only buoyed up by Gina’s enthusiasm. Gina still had not grasped the full flavour of their going; at thirteen her thoughts were of surfing, and swimming, and
sideways looks at boys.

  In the thick-walled stone villa where they had often been visitors, the polished floors were cool underfoot. Aimless as a sleepwalker, Lily drifted through the dim familiar rooms; although she had longed to soak in strong light, they had arrived in the middle of a heatwave, and the windows were protected by heavy curtains. Each night the house creaked and groaned in sympathy as she lay in the stuffy darkness mourning Tom. Through a stretch of scorching days it shielded them like a living skin, until the cool change blew in from the sea with a swell of net at the open windows. Then rain sang on the tin roof, and the wind roared in the chimneys and rattled the ancient sash windows, breaking the silence in which she sat, stricken. She and Tom had been parted before, but there had always been a date for a reunion.

  Yet there was solace in inhabiting a long familiar space and she felt suddenly as if in all her restless life she had failed to find a pattern that matched this one, for it was this stone house that had established her concepts of space and light. Her mother’s touch was everywhere, and her grandmother lingered, too – in the corners of the wardrobe, in the empty dressing-table drawers. Lily pressed a fingertip and gathered ancient particles of loose face powder, fine dust from the lives of the women who had inhabited the house before her. She would have been glad of their company and advice, but in the brown speckled glass she met only her own troubled gaze.

  Their two suitcases, spilling clutter, had burst upon the orderly rooms like a pair of masked intruders. For all its familiarity she was a stranger here, and Gina, too, once the first ecstasy of running from the house to the sea was over, had discovered that she was a camper. Lily registered the discontented thrust of her chin towards a childish alphabet that hung above her bed, and the wooden horse belonging to some grown up cousin, which straddled the empty fireplace in her bedroom.

  She waited for Tom to ring.

  “I want to swim.” Gina was fretful, with a whine hatching at the back of her nose.

  “Just wait for the phone, and then if it’s not too dark we’ll go together,” Lily pleaded.

  But Gina’s eyes flashed, and suddenly she was beyond reach. Exhaustion and the kaleidoscope of recent changes had catapulted her into that no-mans-land where thirteen-year-old girls, all jutting chins, elbows, and irrational impulses, run the gauntlet of parental displeasure.

  “But I want to go now!”

  “You can’t. Not right this minute.”

  “You can’t stop me!” Gina slammed out of the front door, and ran into the street.

  Rage propelled Lily after her. “Come back now! You hear me?”

  Gina’s bare feet slapped the pavement as she marched stiff-legged towards the ocean. She wore bathers, and the straps across her back had slipped, revealing two crescents of paler skin: in the twenty-four hours since their arrival, Gina’s olive complexion had responded to the sun.

  Lily lunged forward and caught her arm.

  “Leave me alone!” Gina pulled back hard, and pushed her chin forward into the space between them.

  Still Lily clung to her; she even managed to drag her a few inches in the direction of the house, before Gina’s strength and defiance defeated her. Panic and shame rose like floodwaters, as Gina flicked her hair and stalked away towards the beach.

  In the bedroom, licking tears from her lips, Lily dialled the series of numbers that would connect her with Tom. As she listened to his telephone ringing, the front door clicked softly: Gina had returned.

  “Give it time Lily, you’ve only just arrived,” Tom said.

  Choking on tears, she thrust the telephone towards her daughter.

  “Daddy, I want to come home,” Gina cried, as Lily wandered out into the darkened garden.

  Tom’s voice had sounded as warm and steady as always. She lifted her face to the canopy of leaves rustling overhead – she had left her husband for a jacaranda tree in flower.

  At Brighton station where, as a schoolgirl, she had waited sitting on a brown Globite school-case, she bought a ticket from the Italian in the kiosk.

  Hairy forearms reached across the counter for the money. “’s a dollar sixty.”

  From the train she gazed with dismay upon rows of utilitarian houses, broad bands of traffic, bus shelters disfigured with graffiti. She remembered with a pang the narrow house on the quayside, so recently abandoned – its winding stair, cast iron fireplaces, and tall shuttered windows. She mustn’t think of it. But what would have happened if she and Tom had never met, had never gone to the Isle of Man? She would have come home years ago, but to what? Would she be poring over plans for one of these dull brick houses on some suburban block, plotting to cover the space between plants in the landscaped front yard with bark chips or designer pebbles? She used to dream of a garden with orange and lemon trees, peaches, apricots, old-fashioned roses, and topiary birds in faded terracotta pots.

  In the side streets of the city, she searched out its espresso heart. At Caffè Buongiorno couples crowded the outside tables, smoking, sipping strong black coffee. Inside, with the hissing Gaggia, the tubs of gelati, and the roar of conversations held at full throttle, it could have been anywhere in Italy. In a sad trance, she listened to the rise and fall of her own language, words she had not heard in years leaping out at her, recovered in a split second with shades of meaning intact. It was a convivial atmosphere, and in the espresso desert of the north of England there was hardly one such place. Perhaps, she thought wistfully, she might live like a migratory bird, departing at the end of each cool northern summer to beat her way south.

  In the mornings, while the pavements rested in the shade of the houses, she walked, casting greedy eyes over ranks of white standard roses and the deep verandahs of Federation villas. In back lanes she discovered the wild gardens where frilly hibiscus and vines lunged over ramshackle fences, where pomegranates dangled beside passionfruit and quinces. She paused to crush leaves and breathe the antiseptic scent of tea-tree, the pungent sap of the slender leaves of the pepper tree. Here were plants she had forgotten; lantana, plumbago, tacoma, the dazzling bird-like strelitzia, and dreamy blue heads of agapanthus, which conjured the image of her mother, Ginny, teacup in hand, on an early morning tour of the garden.

  “Such agapanthus this year!”

  For years she had imagined these plants belonged to the animal kingdom: hippopotamus; rhinoceros; agapanthus.

  The hiss of sprinklers was the music of childhood, and she listened to it now with sad delight as she waited for a sign, something to tell her what to do about her grief.

  In the late afternoon, she and Gina walked the length of the esplanade where new houses jostled for elbow room; it had been all sand hills when Lily was a child. She shaded her eyes and searched the cliff face at the end of the bay where her aunt’s old house, embedded in vines and trees, perched above the dry gullies – the gullies were now crammed with gaunt structures of glass and steel. They passed a rare piece of vacant land covered with pig-face and clumps of bunny tails.

  “It used to be like this all over,” she said, but Gina had no interest in the past.

  A tiny dog materialised at their feet, a poodle, wagging its stump of tail and panting in the heat.

  “Where did you come from?” Lily bent to pat its curly head.

  A girl jogged past on the other side of the road. “Not mine,” she shouted, and kept on running.

  Gina stooped to pick up the dog. “He isn’t wearing a collar.”

  In the creature’s soft bewildered eyes Lily met the trusting gaze of her own dog, Cosy. Cosy had been left on the island with Tom, and was no doubt probing the chilly air for clues to the vexing problem of their absence. Her little footpads were tough from running on the shingle beach in all weathers. For days now she would have run and run, chasing seabirds, breasting sudden swells of icy salt water, and looking back to find only the lone figure of Tom leaning into the wind on the few yards of frozen sand at the water’s edge. In the solid heat of a summer afternoon Lily shivered at the image
of those solitary shapes, man and dog pressed beneath the marble slab of a winter sky.

  Gina cradled the stray dog with the same enslaved expression she had worn when she came home from the boating lake carrying a rescued duckling. Lily’s response now was the same.

  “Gina, we can’t keep it.”

  “Well we can’t just let him get run over!” Gina’s voice was spangled with overtones; the everyday teenage irritation she felt towards Lily, and the polarised opinions she held about liking where she was and yet feeling uprooted.

  Behind them, a woman in baseball cap and trainers ushered a white standard poodle onto the pavement, then turned to them with a relieved smile.

  “I’ve been terribly worried about this little fellow. I saw him from my window, darting amongst the traffic.”

  “He’s not ours,” Lily said, registering a creeping desperation in her voice.

  “He hasn’t got a collar.” Gina still hugged the dog protectively.

  “He looks very well cared for.” The woman was a neat greying blonde who had powdered her nose with care before stepping out on her walk. “He must have escaped.”

  “We can’t take it,” Lily said, “we’ve only just arrived.”

  “Oh! Well, welcome to Adelaide!”

  “He needs a drink,” Gina said.

  Lily closed her eyes against the enamelled glare of the day, and the sight of her daughter cradling the stray dog so tenderly.

  “Keep an eye on Angeline and I’ll find a lead and collar.” The woman pronounced her dog’s name ‘On-gel-een’ and pressed the lead into Lily’s hand.